TalkLeft - Why Arar Was Tortured

Why Arar Was Tortured
by TChris

This attitude toward individual liberty has become typical in the Bush administration.

"We wanted more information," said the former official, who sat in on discussions of Mr. Arar's fate in 2002. "The one way we wouldn't get it is if we let him go."

The official is talking about Maher Arar, who was kidnapped by the United States government and whisked away to Syria for interrogation. (Talkleft background collected here.) The administration claims it had evidence that the Canadian was a member of Al Qaeda, but Arar was released when ten months of imprisonment and torture produced no evidence to support the claim.

Even a casual reader of the Constitution might think that a deprivation of liberty requires something more than an unspecified level of suspicion held by unnamed bureaucrats in the Justice Department on the basis of secret evidence. One might expect proof to be presented to a neutral magistrate before the government removes someone from American soil and tosses him into a foreign prison to be tortured. “We wanted more information and we couldn’t get it if we let him go” is a poor substitute for due process.

Kidnapped, held and tortured for 10 months and then let go for failure to discover any information upon which to keep the lucky bastard. This is FREEDOM ON THE MARCH, dude!